


White Pigeon Ticket

by Looks_Clear (chrysalisdreams)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Winchester Loves Castiel, Episode Related, Gen, Post-Episode: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, The 4th wall breaking is canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:41:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28085622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrysalisdreams/pseuds/Looks_Clear
Summary: Jack and Amara have a conversation about godhood, Chuck's storytelling, and the rules of Keno.
Kudos: 5





	White Pigeon Ticket

“Hello,” said Jack, in the space between atoms and moments.

“It’s too bad we didn’t get to know each other sooner,” Amara said to her great-nephew nephil — Jack — who had just siphoned a deifying level of power out of her brother, releasing Amara out from under it. She took his hand so that he could help her upright. She dusted off her houndstooth pedal-pushers and straightened her baseball jacket, which along with the colorful Keds sneakers were a new look she was trying out.

Jack’s smile blazed. “We could start getting to know each other now,” he offered. “I don’t want to be God alone. But I won’t ask my dads to take that responsibility. They’ve done a lot already.”

“I offered my brother co-existence in harmony,” Amara said. “A true togetherness. Would you like that, Jack?”

“I would,” he answered.

“Do you like games, Jack? I do. A big win is the goal, of course, but I have to say,” she looked at him, pleased as a cat with cream, “the thrill of playing, not knowing how it will go, it’s been exhilarating. My brother liked things scripted. I prefer random chance.”

“Are you talking about…” Jack began to ask, gesturing indicate the final fight with Chuck, the win for free will, and Jack’s own ascendance into godhood. “This?”

“This,” Amara said at the same time as Jack. “You know, I love Keno. We happened across it on my first full tour of Chuck’s creation, after my brother and I reconciled. Chuck finds it boring, maybe that’s why I loved it, maybe because, like me and like that “death book” of his, he wrote it into his story and then it got away from him.”

Jack frowned, big wrinkles creasing his youthfully smooth brow.

Amara smiled indulgently. Hands on her hips, she exhaled a let’s-get-to-it-then breath. “Chuck was always a story, and I was always a game of chance,” she said. “We, that is, you and me and Dean and Sam, won because the plot demanded it, but the plot demanded it because my numbers came up.”

“I don’t understand,” Jack said. “Are you saying, we were playing a game since the beginning? That you’re the same as Chuck?”

“Not at all!” Amara rushed to correct. “Jack, time is a construct. You’re going to need to understand these things now that you’re omniscient and omnipresent.” She tapped her lip. “Maybe I can explain it this way. The rules of Keno are like a story. Chuck loves using mirrors in his stories, Michael and Lucifer, Cain and Abel, Dean and Sam. Himself and Michael and John and Dean.

“Let’s say Chuck’s story has been a mirror for Keno.” Amara began, showing Jack how it had been from her point of view.

* * *

  1. Keno is played with balls imprinted with numbers. They are put in a container (all creation) where they spin around until 20 balls (Chuck’s main and supporting cast) are drawn. There are a total of 3,535,316,142,212,174,320 possible combinations when drawing twenty out of eighty numbered Keno balls.



* * *

In the Beginning, there was Darkness. Then God said,

“Let there be me.”

And from His light He made four archangels. By the fourth archangel, He had thought of a plot twist, so He locked His sister, the Darkness, into a cage and had Lucifer bear the key. There had to be a key, of course, to create some tension about the Darkness getting out and, presumably, getting even. 

After making the archangels and setting the oldest and youngest against each other because stories needed conflict, He made the host of angels. He made His first few universes — drafts — to give the story some action. He wasn’t writing anything down at this point, so it would be more accurate to say that God’s first act of worldbuilding was plot bunny procreation. He made Eve-the-first-woman, and He made Eve-the-mother-of-monsters, and He made leviathan older than all of them, then mixed things up, let the bunnies get away from Him, and retconned reapers into an order of angel.

By the time He picked Metatron out of the secretarial pool, countless restarts and loose threads later, He had settled into his favorite plot, the one about two brothers and the battle of the end.

And by that time, he didn’t care much about being capitalized anymore. He wandered off to write, abandoning three quintillion plus angels, monsters, humans, and demons over many worlds. In each world, though, variations of the same number of characters played out more or less the same story.

* * *

2\. Before you consider any Keno strategy, remember that the sequence of numbers that are drawn in Keno is totally random. You cannot really affect the odds of the game too much.

* * *

“As for me, I couldn’t do anything but exist, not until Lucifer passed the key to my prison onto Cain, and Cain fell in love with Colette,” Amara explained. “Like Death, love exists in the structure of all creation. It was in the bond before Chuck and I split light from darkness, and I even believe he loved his creation, really loved them, once. Before control became more important to him.”

Jack was rapt. “But Sam and Dean. They worried that love wasn’t real because Chuck controlled how they felt,” he questioned.

“Well.” Amara made a face. “I know about the cupids. Chuck had some romantic subplots. He threw in some sex because it furthered man pain. But for the most part, I don’t think he was terribly interested in romance or what made relationships. He thought it was too navel-gazey. Chuck’s idea of completing romantic subplot was leaving Cain suffering after being made to kill Colette. Chuck forgot about Cain until Dean took the mark.” Amara imagined how her own expression looked, thinking of Dean. She did love Dean, not the way Cain loved Colette and certainly not the way Dean loved his Angel of Thursday, but she and Dean had a connection, and Chuck had not written it.

“Chuck got excited about Dean taking the mark because it gave him another way to pitch brother against brother. He wanted Dean, controlled by the mark, to kill Sam. When that didn’t work, he tried it from the self-sacrifice angle, Sam giving himself up so they could end the cycle.”

Jack knew this part. “Dean killed Death instead. And then Cas killed Billie, and Billie became the new Death,” he supplied.

“They broke out of their stories. They escaped their plots. All my numbers, coming up, and I started winning,” Amara said.

* * *

3\. Most players simply have their favorite or just lucky numbers and their combinations which they bet on.

* * *

“Each game ticket for me was a world Chuck wrote and abandoned as a bad draft. He left his stories unfinished after Sam killed Dean or Dean killed Sam, or when he started one that didn’t have them in it. I had a few numbers come up in each of them, but not enough of them to free me.” Jack listened attentively, poor kid. “This is becoming a little dry,” Amara interrupted herself. “We should have drinks.”

As easy as that, they were in a casino north of Marysville, Washington. Amara slid a tulip glass full of sparkling soda and maraschino cherries toward Jack. Hers was a sidecar with a sugar rim.

Jack looked around. “The people,” he said, and the now crowded casino hummed with the activity of players at slot machines and card tables. At the other end of the moment, he and Amara would be back in Harmon, Illinois, to say goodbye to Sam and Dean. For now, he lipped the straw of his Shirley Temple, sipped, and smiled at the taste. “I’m listening,” he prompted Amara.

“Hmm. You know, Keno has been around since before the angels shut themselves in heaven. Two thousand years ago, it involved messenger pigeons. And winning wasn’t determined by numbers, but by… characters.” She propped her elbow on the table and rested her cheek on her hand. “I have my favorites. Dean, of course, was my lucky break. This Dean was different. The people you meet, the ones you love… they change you. I’ve seen that. I feel it, too.” 

She considered a little longer. “I mistreated Castiel. I owe him compensation, I think.” She frowned. “I think I owe him more than that.” She sipped. “The one version of him that wouldn’t do what Chuck wanted. He won this game for us, didn’t he? He made you possible. Protected your mother, let you be born. Put you on the board. He made you matter to Dean and Sam.”

“Cas is gone,” Jack said. “It isn’t right. I called to him, but I don’t think he could hear me. The Empty said I made it loud. It says I have  _ no sway _ there.”

Laughing lightly, shaking her head, Amara said, “But _I_ do. I _am_ the Darkness. The void. The Empty cannot exist without me.”

“That’s good then!”

She pushed away from the high table and slid off her barstool, stretching her back a bit. It had been crowded in Chuck’s inner space, with his ego.

“Amara,” Jack said as he climbed off his seat, too. “I don’t want to be like Chuck.”

Amara tilted her head. “How do you want to be the Almighty, Jack?”

“That’s just it. I don’t. Want to be… big G God. I don’t want us to be that. I just want to be.”

“There’s happiness in just being,” Amara agreed. “But there is happiness in letting things happen, too. If you want it to let the numbers pop up the way they may, it would keep the fun going.”

“That sounds like,” Jack mused carefully, “free will. Like giving the, um, Keno balls free will.”

Amara took her great-nephew’s hand and squeezed. They were going to get along well. “It does, doesn’t it?”

* * *

4\. In Keno, the number sequence is random and players have no influence on the outcome of the game. If your number is selected, you win -- simple as that! 

* * *

“Chuck was always pulling angels and demons out of the Empty, by the way,” she informed him. “It wasn’t even a retcon. He simply ignored consistency. Right up until, well, now,” she waved at the point in which they existed, “I didn’t know if he would concede the game. You surprised him before he could cheat.” 

“So you didn’t know if we would win or lose, even if your numbers came up, like you said?” Jack asked, his disbelief clear.

Amara lifted her shoulders lightly — a relaxed shrug. “The best way to win is to hope you’re lucky and to go for the big win,” she answered. “Not controlling every minor or major move, just seeing what happens after you set up your game. It’s satisfying.”

Swinging their joined hands, Amara started them on their way. “What do you think, Jack? Ready to roll?”

777

**Author's Note:**

> I blatantly stole plenty from this website about Keno [PokerNew.com How to Play Keno](https://www.pokernews.com/casino/how-play-keno.htm) because they explained it in such a cute way.
> 
> The title for this comes from the game from which Keno (and Bingo and the lottery) originated.


End file.
